The Adams Society (mathematics) has continued its success in the past year. The speakers series started in Easter ‘14, with Dr. Alexandre Bouayad’s talk on Quantum Groups. Archimedeans, the university maths society, helped us advertise it and boosted the event’s popularity.

Michaelmas began with Prof. Tom Körner exploring submarine hunting strategies in WWII. This was followed by Prof. Richard Samworth on Stein’s lemma in decision theory, and Prof. Michael Potter (Philosophy faculty) on Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. The last talk even managed to attract some philosophy students (for the first half at least).

Kick-starting Lent term was Prof. Kevin Buzzard from Imperial leading us into the strange world of p-adic numbers. Prof. Colm-cille Caulfield was next to trace the steps of fluid mechanics giant GI Taylor, followed by Prof. Amanda Turner’s (old Johnian) talk on the young yet fascinating field of random growth. The series ended in a bang when our own applied Director of Studies Dr. Dörrzapf delivered a talk on risk evaluation in financial markets, which saw the highest attendance of any talk in the year.

On the social front, the Garden party was open to University members for the first time in recent memory, and enjoyed a record attendance. We narrowly lost to Trinity in the Cricket match by mere 2 runs, but I know a magnificent comeback awaits. Desserts party and Annual Dinner were the social highlights as usual, with Prof. Chris Rogers kindly appearing as speaker for the latter and recounting anecdotes from his personal experience. We also added a Christmas party to our social calendar and revived the football match against Clare college (and won approximately 9:1) in Lent, owing to the tireless work of vice-president Maria.

I’d like to thank the committee for ensuring the smooth running of the society, and to the fellows for their unrelenting support. Finally, I’d like to wish the incoming committee and the society all best in years to come!

Zhaoxin Wang, President 2014-2015

You can view other Presidents’ reports here.